LilyRobert

A few months after his video game performance Yvain!, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange returns to inhabit the exhibition space with Montagne de lumière, his first solo show in a French gallery.

On this occasion, the artist unfolds an updated version of the new age-pastoral installation presented last April at centre d’art Les Capucins, in Embrun, as the result of interdisciplinary collaborations with healers, local craftsmen and sheep farmers of the Alps de Haute-Provence. At Lily Robert, an unreleased series of reliefs - like bizarre fossils of a phantasmagorical geological era - traces new body transfigurations, incorporating pelvic massage tools, ropes, canine ritual masks and odd vegetable grafts; an initiatory path throughout epidermal solicitations, rural paraphernalia and sensual body rehabilitation devices, which lead the spectator toward a shamanic realm, halfway between a country-side wellness centre and an archaic scientific laboratory.

If the post-human sanctioned a peremptorily in-born profusion between man and technology, organic and mechanical, Eric reformulates the hybridization precepts looking back at the primordial and the transcendental as the main access to a deeper terrestrial experience, where local and global, nature and industry, human and zoological, joys and torture tunefully coexistence. In his ludic mise-en-scène, every techno-scientific tyranny or harsh globalization side-effect seem to be forestalled and relieved by the return to ancestral cults, local wisdom, grotesque experiments and arcane, folkloristic practices, all ratifying the body centrality and its mutation.

This same urgency animates and drives the protagonist of She Wolves, a six chapter experimental video game played on the upper room of the gallery (which will also be activated as a performance venue on Saturday, January 19th). Here the visitor is invited to grab a playstation controller and play the story of a sheep farmer captured by women werewolves after « a massage of the soul » at the Spa of Saint-Véran, close to the location where the first wolf appeared twenty years ago, a hundred years after its extinction on this side of the Italian border. Vernacular shapeshifting legends collected in the mountain raise again, mixed with pop culture references from Twilight to Twin Peaks. The mythical meets the political in a transcendental humorous narration through psychedelic guided meditations and BDSM delights connecting with the ropes installation of the lower floor. Sextoys change into fertility instruments as the lower stratas of mother earth joyfully welcome gallons of Roundup©.

Text by Fabio Santacroce

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Eric Giraudet de Boudemange was born in 1983 in Boulogne Billancourt. He lives in Paris and works in France and abroad. After studying at ensb-a, Paris, Le Fresnoy and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, he was invited to participate to several artistic residencies in Europe, as well as in Cairo (Townhouse gallery), Cotonou (Mava) and New Orleans (Deltaworkers). Recently, he has presented performances at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Ricard and La Criée. He was granted solo exhibitions at the Fries Museum, Punt WG and Billytown in the Netherlands and Centre d'art Les Capucins in France. He is currently a resident at CAC Brétigny for a project mixing pigeon paths, meditation and labyrinths.

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Photography by Maurine Tric